segunda-feira, 14 de janeiro de 2008

Work In Progress

Working title is "Wet Nurse"I put some images from one of my first work with the new press. It is printing on cloth, digital images, glass and a kind of silk braid. It is called wet nurse, and is about the black females that nursed the sons of their masters in Brazil, in the slavery period.

I JUST FOUND THIS PIECE OF WRITING WITHIN A PDF on DUTCH MUSEUM WEBSITEwhich I think was a commentry on the artists participating in an exhibition called "Roots and More" held there recently.

Regretfully - I could not find the name of the author as it is very well interpreted/written.

"The installation Wet Nurse (Min) by Rosana Paulino (Brazil, 1967) evokes the image of Black Min, a female slave ordered to breastfeed the child of her mistress. The silhouettes are the black nurse maids during slavery; the bottles contain photos the silhouettes are based on. The white ribbons conjure up associations with mother’s milk. Paulino’s terracotta army of Soldiers strikes a parallel between human society and the world of insects. She presents an insect community consisting of a queen, workers and soldiers, all female. Paulino wants to draw attention to the different aspects of female nature, ranging from caring, peace-loving, obedient and subservient to rebellious and combatant. But her powerful women have no eyes: “They largely fail to see what their place is in the world. They also lack arms, as they have not found the balance between femininity and standing up for their rights.

Brazilian society is still very sexist, making it hard for women to strike that balance between being a ‘worker’ and a ‘soldier’. And for a black woman, this is even harder”. The figures are draped with strips of fabric, chains and fish hooks, and rope connects them with sticks, stones, bundles of nails and an anchor. The Kongo influence clearly comes to the fore through the ‘charging’ of the statues with power symbols – such as nails and the red fabric symbolizing force.